Various popular machine guns such as the FN (Fabrique Nationale) Mag, the 240/Mag, the German MG3 and MG42/59 machine gun manufactured by Rhinemettall and other licensed and unlicensed copies of these machine guns use either a side hanging drum type box or pouch-bag to store and feed ammunition to the machine gun. Such ammunition boxes and bags are needed to hold and bundle linked rounds. However, there are many problems with such side hanging ammunition boxes and bags. These boxes and bags vary in size to hold 50 to 150 linked rounds. The most popular being the 100 round box or bag that weighs approximately 5 pounds.
Spent cartridges are exhausted generally downward from these popular types of machine guns and can hit the soldier/operator. Also, if the machine gun is mounted on a stand above a ground surface, the spent cartridges can bounce down and reflect up hitting the soldier/operator as well.
Pouch bags made from fabric material can easily become damaged and ruined by the downwardly ejected spent cartridges. For example, spent cartridges that bounce against a ground surface can also bounce up striking the fabric surfaces of the pouch bag and both damage and further ruin the pouch bag.
Furthermore, the weight and mass of the side hanging ammunition box and bag causes other problems since the current boxes and bags solely hang to one side of the firearm, which pulls the firearm off-balance and to one side. The current hanging boxes and bags create a side pulling weight that tends to cause the soldier/operator to overcompensate the weight to one side of the firearm in order to orient the firearm into a firing position. This constant repositioning can affect the aim and resulting shots from the machine gun.
Additionally, the weight and mass of the side hanging bags and boxes also makes the firearms difficult to carry and move into place. Additional seconds of extra time to carry and position the firearm can affect the necessity for using the firearm that exist in immediate use applications such as in combat type situations.
Trying to solve these problems by positioning extra bags and/or weights on the opposite side so that the firearm has two bags (or counter-weight) each hanging to one side to balance the firearm does not overcome these problems. The popular machine guns require a feed type belt to the left side of the gun that can only be inserted into one side bag. Thus, in a short time, one bag type side weight would easily outweigh the other side and still cause the side tilting and offset balance problem. Additionally, adding another load does not stop the spent cartridge cases from still ejecting downward and causing the other previously listed problems. Still furthermore, using extra bags and/or opposite side weights would make the carrying and positioning the machine gun impractical and tedious to use. The extra mass and weight of using additional bags (or counter-weight(s)) would add unnecessarily carrying loads to the operator/soldier who already is required to carry a substantial amount of gear.
Thus, the need exists for solutions to the above problems with the prior art.